After London

by Alan Jenkins

(To the fifty-two dead and hundreds injured, London, July 7th 2005; and to Jean Charles de Menezes, killed by the Metropolitan Police two weeks later.)

July 7th

All day and everywhere,

whop-whop and wail of sirens,

electricity in the air. . .

At Battersea, in irons

and quite alone, I’d left behind

those fear-filled environs

but not looked to find

this after-London in the way

storm-light fell on the mind,

on still, deserted streets, grey-

green, dust-coated leaves

and rough parched clay.

Now all of London grieves:

for those whose day began

in routine that deceives

but was part of someone’s plan

and ended with a flash,

with flesh and blood that ran

down metal walls, with ash;

for what was lost, not just

the dead but London’s brash

and beautiful, and broken, trust. 

                 ~~~

  July 22nd

Walk it back, reverse, rewind –

from the carriage-floor, the awful pools

and rivulets, the trip-wired trigger-happy tools

stood round, the shots, the shouts

that no-one heard, back through the train

stopping at the platform and the dash – a plain

commuter-dash – for the escalators,

through his route from the bus-stop, through

his bus-ride on the crowded, ordinary Number 2

to Brixton where he stepped off

at the tube (closed) and let someone know

he’d be late to the Kilburn call-out – those in the know

saw this behaviour as ‘suspicious’,

which he was ‘known’ for in the half-hour, no more,

that remained to him till Stockwell and the carriage-floor,

where they shot him eight times – through

the flat he left for work, where ‘surveillance’ failed

(officer ‘Frank’ was pissing up a wall) so he was tailed

from a car that had to negotiate the morning

traffic. . .through school in São Paolo, all the way back

to the farm where he grew up, an ordinary boy with a knack

for electronics that he learned would pay. Now fast-forward to that day.